Saturday, 26 June 2010

Today I want to talk about vinegar – aceto balsamico di Modena to be precise, more commonly referred to as balsamic vinegar.

Traditional balsamic vinegar is a reduction of white grapes that is aged in successively smaller barrels for anything from 12 to 25 years, whereas the di Modena crap is just vinegar with caramel colouring and cornflour thickening added and does not even need to be aged, yet people still pay a bloody fortune for it. Thousands of litres of this muck is produced on a daily basis, but it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the genuine article, which is called aceto balsamico tradizionale.

What gets me is that people who sell the di Modena stuff have the gall to call it ‘genuine’, which is like saying genuine imitation leather or genuine Somalian scotch.